It's a Don's Life by Mary Beard Beard, one of Britain's most distinguished classicists, a Cambridge professor and an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, has for the past three years been blogging about her activities and preoccupations at the Times website. Some 80 of her posts are collected in this volume, along with comments from her blog's most devoted followers. Beard has a spry, pithy, conversational style, and when she writes about her own peculiar areas of knowledge, such as racism in the Roman empire or brothels in Pompeii, she is often as entertaining as the blog form will allow. But there is also, at times, a conflict between the dignity of her subject matter and the modishness and self-conscious informality her medium brings out in her. References to Jade Goody and David Beckham sit uncomfortably between quotations from Virgil and Ovid, and her use of slang ("gobsmackingly", "bitching",